Having spent my school years on the sidelines of love, I naturally scorned anyone who was in the game. So I arrived in New York two years ago as a self-righteous anti-romantic who mocked starry-eyed idealists, considered sex a nonthinking act between two imbeciles, and pitied women who lost their identities and independence as they plummeted into that meaningless void called "love."

If I continue to read things like this I will become unable to formulate text, lest I produce: "the Love Train did find its way to my scowling gargoyle heart." You're ruining a generation here, Becks, Ginsberg-style.

What saddens me about this ML is that you could see how, if written by someone with any capacity for self-reflection, possibly with a passable prose style, this could have yielded a sort-of thoughtful column about relationships. That moment of epiphany in "Wait. Who is actually willing to date you?" is a kind of poignant moment of realization that "love" has nothing to do with intrinsic value, but is merely the totally subjective value we cover people over with until we can no longer see them for who they are. That is, she should have quoted Stendhal, and also picked a central fucking metaphor.

After re-reading this sentence ("But I allowed him to feed his vices in my home and with my resources as long as it meant that he would allow me to feed my vice: him"), I have decided that it is impossible that this column was written in earnest, and that Meghan Meehan must be a clever lurker here who thought it would be hilarious to use all of the classic ML shittyisms at once to see if ML would have no choice but to print it. Way to go, MM. Way to go. Unmask yourself at any moment.

22: Actually, I think the relevant line in the bio is "worked as a freelance editor for such publications as the Onion" -- perhaps she submitted this to the NYT after the Onion rejected it as too subtle.

Watch crystallization in process: The adorably nondescript and faintly rude guy who lives below me, for whom I've maintained a meaningless and undirected crush for six months, is now listening to loud gangsta rap. And, because Stendhal is correct, my brain has decided this must be yet another of his extraordinary excellencies as a person.

43: But everyone listens to rap. How is it in itself an indicator of excellence, except in the subjective context of crush? (Don't worry, Emerson; the crush is limited to trying to think of a cute thing to say when I run into him in the hall every few months.)

I don't think it's crunk. In fact, it might be something sorta boutiquey and underground.

At tday the tale was related of an extremely awkward fellow whose awkwardness is by design: the relator said of the relatum that he enjoys the tense awkward moments before the first kiss more than any possible kiss itself, and therefore seeks to prolong and savor them. We might call him the Great Valerio, in memory of the passage in Also Sprach Richard Thompson likening man to a tightrope-walker: ein gefährliches Hinüber, ein gefährliches Auf-dem-Wege, ein gefährliches Zurückblicken, ein gefährliches Schaudern und Stehenbleiben!

My Cleveland roommate and I had a sly contest to say the most awkward things possible during sex (with other people, and report back). It obviously fucked both of us up forever, as now it's pretty impossible for me to do anyone without thinking of terrible things and laughing.

In college way back when one woman looked at her watch right in the heat of the action. I don't know whether she was waiting for it to be over with, running a survey, or just trying to induce performance anxiety.

".... So on his next date he decides to follow the counselor's advice. So first he recites a poem while sitting in the lotus position, and then he makes love while gazing at the moon, and chanting, until the girl finally asks 'Why are you fucking like a Chinaman'".

60- I know someone who was doing the deed when he announced, "I AM TURNING INTO A BEAR." He continued about the rumpty-tumpty while telling her about the act of love as experienced by a werebear. He says she did not mind, staggeringly enough.

Oh, one of the best ever was while I was having a very brief affair with this roommate's brother, who was in town. We kept it from my roommate for a day, and then told him. He was sort of horrified, but we had plans to go see Pink Narcissus that night. If you're not familiar, PN is an extraordinary silent gay porn film from 1971 with an extremely long and boring sequence in which a man with a huge erection dances while covered in strings of beads. I didn't sleep with the roommate's brother for long after that, but describing big ropes of beads never failed to produce timely guffaws.

I had a friend who was dating a guy who did that; woke up early one morning in a lovesick panic and showed up at her door at 8am on his bike, having bought flowers, terrified that he'd said something wrong and she'd break it off with him.

90: The kind that isn't neurotic or depressed. Neuroses and depression lead to bad sex, IME, but all other kinds of crazy == hott sex. Unfortunately, in my case it also led to attempted murder, but YMMV.

Really? You don't just wind up having stupid fights about how you did his crazy ass shit last week and he never wants to do your crazy ass shit and why does he have to be such a selfish, selfish bastard...?

What happens is you wind up having fights like normal, except that some of of them are because he's accusing you of turning all of the light switches upside down. Which is all fine and good, no worse than a regular fight, until he decides that that's part of your big plan to electrocute him in his sleep, at which point he has to take action.

112 is fair enough -- it all depends on the kind of crazy and the degree to which you are in an actual relationship with the person. I've had both varieties, and the cheerful selfish bastard who truly doesn't care if you do crazy shit is rarer, I think, but definitely a fun time. I don't enjoy fights either, but I've had some smoking hot sex with people who made me miserable otherwise, and I can't deny that the sex was genuinely hot.

We're getting close to the "nice guy" argument another fucking time. Might we just agree that sexy and nice have some overlap and a lot of non-overlap, and that niceness per se is not sexy and even detracys from certain kinds of sexiness?

117: Fortunately, I am not on any great quest for happy-relationship-fu anytime in the immediate future. Unfortunately, the thought that hot-sex-fu implicitly involves some level of inappropriate triggers my highly responsive good-girl uptightness instincts and I am left but to blush and think wistfully, "AWB and B must have soooo much fun."

B and I have all the hot-inappropriate-sex-fu one can master, but for happy-relationship-fu, you'll have to seek answers elsewhere.

Hey! I've have happy relationship fu too. The common factor in both is clearsightedness: being able to acknowledge "so and so is crappy relationship material, but he's hot, so what the hell" as well as "this guy is an excellent match for me."

Wholesome girls like B have more fun. The rest of you bitches are just out of luck. Her father was a minister of the gospel, you know, and she didn't know what a penis was until she was 21. She drives men wild.

You have got to be kidding me. This was one of the best Modern Love columns yet. Honest, straightforward, direct, and didn't try to squirm away from the depths of romance using psychobabble. Normally Modern Love makes me think love is dead, this one gave me hope.

126: I'd reassure you that you eventually get used to it, but that's a damned lie. Turns out that when your libido is no longer artificially suppressed by the depression of a soul-sucking sewage pit of a relationship, being practically a virgin gets really annoying. Also turns out that getting "back out there" can be rather disorienting when trying to simultaneously readjust to the whole enjoying sex thing while at the same time reacclimating to the bizarre cultural institution known as "dating."

134: Yeah, it really sucks. The first few months were the worst. But now it's just sort of low-grade awful all the time. I'm not depressed, just really fucking annoyed about celibacy and way too disappointed with the mass of humanity in my locale to do anything about it. Douchebags abound.

I have to amend 121. I had nothing resembling good sex with one of the psychotics I dated. We could kiss, but anything beyond that she tensed up. Any kind of contact in any erogenous zone and she'd tremble and start to cry. So sex was pretty much me holding her for a few hours and telling her I didn't mind not having sex. Not hott,perhaps, but I still am fond of her and hope to hell she's ok.

This thread provides yet more evidence that sex with AWB is an unusually complex and fraught activity.

the bizarre cultural institution known as "dating."

A good deal of the bizarreness comes from the two possible functions of dating -- checking out minimal conversational compatibility / personal chemistry with sex partners, or dating to find a long term relationship. Good to have pretty clearly in mind which one you want. Of course, there's a third one too, free dinners.

134,138: I'm sure it's different for the laydeez, but I found it did get a lot better after the first few weeks. When I stopped worrying about it, it became much, much easier to deal with. Of course, I'm much more of a born-again virgin than either of you, but I suspect that desperation is unsexy regardless of gender. I get flirted with much more now when I'm not worried about sex than I did when I was.

This thread provides yet more evidence that sex with AWB is an unusually complex and fraught activity.

Eh, not really. I like enjoying sex, as opposed to interpreting it and worrying about it and feeling guilt about it and attaching status to it all the time. What you call "complex and fraught" is what I feel as "totally divorced from complexity."

Anyway, people aren't boring, AWB. People are fucking amazing. Like the man (Rilke) said: "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not a poet enough to call forth its riches"

You might suspect this, but it turns out that announcing that you really, really desparately want to get laid is an effective strategy for attracting willing men. This may not work the same way with genders reversed.

164: I am feeling a little misanthropic these days, especially about the NYC dating pool. I know that, deep down, each of them are unique snowflakes of individuality and magic, but they choose to present themselves in ham-fisted stereotypes and cheeseball speeches.

I have known lots and lots of incredible, amazing people, and it's only because of those people that I am so often depressed about new ones.

167: Seems like the "easiest" solution is to mix it up a bit as far as the social circle you are meeting people in. Where exactly you meet a different set of people -- short of the advice I always seem to get about how I should go back to church so I can meet a nice young man -- I don't have the first idea.

Wait, never mind. I'm being dense -- the answer lies within! Crazy guys rock in the sack. Ex-addicts, whoa, lookout! So, clearly the solution is to go volunteer (or just hang out) at a halfway house or similar such institution.

Emerson has convinced me to switch pseuds from "sin", which I only adopted because of three-letter anonymity day.

I'm not sure the crazy/good lover connection applies to women. The best lover I ever had -- who was so good that she asymptotically approached the upper limit of how good it is possible to be -- was (outside of bed) a remarkably prudent, well organized, and conservative sort of person. I think with women it's just kind of a roll of the dice on how sexuality ends up, there's a ton of natural variation.

I had a guy friend who was a magnet for talented, attractive crazy women. From what he said they had the complete range from fantastic to awful. In many cases he just because a Platonic, conversational friend.

large populations of singles become frighteningly homogenous"/i>
So do what I do: rent a garret. Make sure that garret has a walk-in closet, and then stick your computer in the walk-in closet. Then conduct your professional life from said computer. You will then be two steps removed from humanity. When you emerge from your hole within a hole, humanity will be a strange a beautiful beast. It can glean cans like the bum, have a hot ass like the girl on the T, or look permanently pissed like the other girl on the T. Beautiful!

Am I too old for anyone with a personality?
Look, no matter what that jerk Rilke says, you're a smart, attractive, and funny woman. You can't go too far wrong. I don't know the NY dating scene, but everywhere else in the world attractive works, and smart and funny are used as matching criteria. I don't know what else to tell you: you have all the the cards, further praise would look even more like flattery.

OK, how about this one?: Tell everybody that you're crazy, and that your disease is wanting to have wild sex all the time and can only be cured with wild sex. Also, have one hand in your coat pocket all the time, holding a heavy object.

Kaye Grogan's revenge was tricking The Editors into turning the blog into an unbroken string of Patriots. Now an angry mob of former reader have burned down Poor Man headquarter while chanting "At least the fucking dinosaur! At least the fucking dinosaur!"

That's alright, my mother has just sent me my childhood teddy bear, and, well, writes: "as you can see you wore it out as a toddler-you wouldn't go to bed without it-when you were tired you would get your teddy & blanket & come to me with your thumb in your mouth & that meant you wanted to go to bed"

My neighbor's sister in law just called from the African nation where she works for the State Department. Her husband had left here to go to their home in Wisconsin, but he hadn't arrived yet and wasn't answering his cell, so she was worried. I wanted my neighbor to point out to her that this could be serious, what with all the cannibals in Wisconsin.